The EU employed 372,400 professional firefighters in 2025, accounting for 0.18% of total employment.
Fire services had a younger workforce than the overall labour market, with 74.7% of employed firefighters under 50 compared with 64.4% across total employment, Eurostat informed on Monday.
Data were available for 22 countries and showed the highest shares of professional firefighters in total employment in Greece (0.47%), Croatia (0.43%) and Portugal (0.33%).
The Netherlands had the lowest share at 0.05%, followed by Austria at 0.07% and Sweden at 0.10%.
How the figures were compiled
The statistics come from an ad hoc extraction of the EU Labour Force Survey, which collects information from households across member states on employment and other labour-market trends.
